Age Flashcards
Gary Ives
econdary school West Yorkshire, 63 teens ‘Do you think people speak differently depending on their age?’ 100 percent said yes. Carried out a discussion in same secondary school with a group of 17-year-old students. They remembered words such as kissy-catch, kerby, tig. When asked about how they speak as teenagers, common words in their lexicon were linked by an informal register with taboo and dialect the most prevalent feature. There were common themes or topics, particularly relationships. Slang part of teenage vernacular. Belief that this slang was specific to their age group and may not be understood or used by the older generation. Examples: chatting rubbish, bare (lots), beef, dench (good) attributive adj.
Anna Brita-Senstrom
common features in teenage talk: irregular turn-taking, overlaps, indistinct articulation, word shortenings, teasing and name calling, verbal duelling, slang, taboo, language mixing.
Ignacio Palacios Martinez 2011
Ignacio Palacios Martinez 2011- teenagers use negatives more frequently than adults. More direct when they speak, whereas adults more conscious of what they say and how they say it to avoid FTA. Typical negative words were mostly informal: ‘no way’, ‘nope’, ‘nah’, ‘dunno’, idiomatic?? Phrase ‘I don’t give a toss’. Negative forms like multiple negation and the non-standard use of ‘never’
HOWEVER Eckert
she claims that ‘Adolescents do not all talk alike… differences among adolescents are probably far greater than speech differences among the members of any other age group.’ While there is patterns, we cannot assume everyone is the same.
Support for differences between age groups
Bergland 1997, found that class is a factor as use of tags differ. Working class teens ‘innit’ more and middle class ‘yeah’
We can’t necessarily state that people in the age group 18-25 will have the same linguistic characteristics. Why?
Eckert 1998 argues there are different ways of defining age. chronological, biological, social age. ‘age is a person’s place at a given time in relation to the social order: a stage, a condition, a place in history’ e.g. language of a single 20-year-old female would not be the same as a married 20-year-old female with 2 children
Cheshire supporting Eckert
Jenny Cheshire 1987 argues ‘it is becoming recognised… that adult language, as well as child language, develops in response to important life events that affect the social relations and social attitudes of individuals.’
